11 comments:

The relationship between what was then known as Pajamas Media and its blogger members is an example of a central problem in finance economics known as "paying the piper" costs. Or, as it is sometimes called, the getting - screwed problem.

I was curious... bloggers always form affiliations or loose alliances based on region or topic, but without an economic element. Is it possible to do what OSM is doing, but strictly on a blogging basis? Like let's say Ann, her ex, and ten other bloggers all decided to market themsleves as a group, with shared ads, blogs run independently. Could that work?

As for all the OSM commentary, I think the back and forth is nonsense so early.

The estimable Prof Bainbridge is discussing "opportunity cost," also known as the "cost/benefit relationship" It's just taking into account what you might have done to determine if what you did was worth it.

I'm too lazy to answer the rest.

Don't even get me started on Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage...

Finn: We could do that in BlogAds. I'm already in two of their groups, Law and Conservative. But we could make up a group called Madison bloggers or something. Sure. That's one of the very nice things about BlogAds. And within its structure, each blogger can still set his own prices independent of the other members of the group and can accept or reject individual ads. BlogAds is really sensitive to the way of the blogger, by design! OSM is destructive of the blogger ethic, I think. I tried to talk about this when Roger L. Simon called me on the phone after this post comparing the two systems, and that's the very thing that made him say "Nice talking to you" and then hang up on. That said a lot! He'd been quite intent on telling me how important it was to the venture capitalists to see a return on their investment. I changed the subject and challenged that perspective. He couldn't talk to me about that and simply hung up on me.

One thing I haven't seen discussed is just what influence OSM will have on the content of individual blogs. In order to sell ads, OSM must be able to guarantee the product. It seems obvious that blogs must be subject to editing to make sure they are serving up the product advertisers are buying.

I can't believe that any blogger, much less the biggies, will change their blogs to suit their advertisers. It would be fun to have a pool so readers can guess which blog drops out first.

I received a scolding from Professor B for hijacking the string. I apologized for thinking it was a lighthearted discussion of OSM and promised to stay on topic should I have the temerity to offer a comment again.

You run a popular weblog (Web blog?). You have regular commenters to your posts whom you know or should know have the maturity level of adolescent boys discovering new bodily fluids (!). There is another popular Web blogger who has posted things in the past that are not exactly glowing reviews of your Web blogging business venture. You link to a post of the second Web blogger and comment about its purported lack of classiness. Your commenters swarm the second Web blogger and hurl insults, invective and libel. Argue for and against holding the first, popular Web blogger respnsible for any injuries suffered at the hands of his commenters.